Another striking thing about Maigret is how much he relies on the police force around him. Today we expect the detective to be a loose cannon, at odds with the department, but Maigret is constantly asking others to surveil and report, the spider in the web. There's only a couple of early stories with hints of a difference - where he notices something odd and ends up following someone on instinct. (Le Pendu de Saint Pholien, La Guinguette a deux sous)
Also - mentioned in the article - but there's a lot of boats! Simenon wrote quite a few of these early novels on board boats and it shows, trawlers and narrowboats abound.
[1] 10 years ago I was able to buy novels on amazon.fr while in France, but this stopped working? It wanted a delivery address and credit card in the country as well. I was cycling round the country back then and ended up buying paperbacks at flea markets instead.
That's because he is a "commissaire", a superintendant, for most of the books.
Maigret is in a lot of way the reverse of a hard boiled detective. He is if not happy at least content in his career as a civil servant and bureaucrat. He is perfectly adept at navigating his hierarchy and knowns his place. Maigret serves a system he respects and values, fully aware of his prejudices which he sees a necessary wall between the honest people and the miscreants. He is very much upper middle class, what the French would call petit bourgeois, a happily married catholic who likes order and long meals.
The article rightfully points that these novels have a reactionary surface but try to find a redeeming feature in how they describe society in its totality. I would be less generous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_(1992_TV_series)
You can even find episodes on certain popular internet sites (though I don't know how they survive there).
Through reading the article I came across David Peace. The Red Riding Quartet is going to have to be investigated.
